If you’re seeking unassailable evidence of the grit and gumption of Gladys Young, M.D. (Class of ’74) while attending UT Southwestern Medical School, look no further than the moment when – as part of a senior movie project – she insisted on using the spacious doctor’s lounge after she discovered that there were only spartan nurses quarters for the female doctors.

As fellow Class of ’74 alumnus Murray Gordon, M.D., who directed the student production, recalled, that scene was emblematic of Dr. Young’s drive and nascent feminist spirit.

“Gladys led the other women into the doctor’s area – with Gladys actually chasing out a doctor,” Dr. Gordon recalled. “It was our little comment on sexual equality. But what still strikes me to this day is how this was so Gladys: displaying her first signs of fighting for equality of women in medicine, and I really liked that.”

This notable bucking of the system sums up the iconoclastic and highly determined medical student Dr. Young was. Indeed, challenging the orthodoxy of how female med students were regarded was not limited to a fictitious film. During her first clinical rotations at Parkland Memorial Hospital, Dr. Young observed the male doctors and residents going into their own comfortable lounging areas where they could exchange ideas.

“So, I just decided to go in there with them,” Dr. Young said. “I said to them, ‘If you are going to teach certain things in the men’s lounging area, I’m coming in to learn.’ My feeling was quite simple: As a woman, I’m as much of a doctor as the male doctors were. It was quite the big deal back then.”

That was only one of several stereotype-shattering moments cementing Dr. Young’s growing reputation as an aspiring doctor marching to her own distinctive drumbeat. To this day, Dr. Young still radiates with palpable pride when describing graduating from UT Southwestern Medical School and then becoming an equally devoted veteran of the Air Force, in which she served as a flight surgeon – retiring with the rank of Colonel in 1997, after more than two decades of service. As she and her peers have already celebrated their 50th year medical school class reunion, she is equally proud to mark this year’s Veterans Day as a member of that rarified UT Southwestern alumni group who balanced both a career in medicine and in the military.

Devotion to horses and medicine

Born Gladys Evelyn Lambeth and raised in Vernon, Texas (the birthplace of Roy Orbison) Dr. Young was an avid horsewoman who rode her favorite palomino in parades and rodeos. Raised in a hamlet on the road to Amarillo, Dr. Young was an enthusiastic member of the Lockett High School pep squad and played varsity basketball, all while graduating as valedictorian of her class. Her father worked in the nearby oilfields and her mother, who was a homemaker, was pursuing her delayed calling as a nurse by the time Dr. Young entered UT Southwestern Medical School in 1970.

Leaving her competitive equine days behind – “When you weigh 180 pounds and all the other girls weigh 110, you don’t tend to win much,” she said – Dr. Young attended Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls (now in the Texas Tech system). There she majored in biology and chemistry and graduated magna cum laude.

“I picked biology and chemistry as I thought I would get a Ph.D. and concentrate on genetic research,” Dr. Young said.

But the 19-year-old experienced a “life-altering” experience while on a church-sponsored mission trip where she taught Bible studies to children in the Rio Grande Valley. She decided, after learning of scores of local children dying before their first birthday, to switch her specialization to premed “as my undergrad advisor told me that if God wants me to do this, then I will get into medical school, which I did,” Dr. Young recalled. “That would be the moment when I made the change from wanting to be a scientist to being a primary care doctor.”

What sealed it for Dr. Young to choose UT Southwestern was when one of the doctors interviewing her told her that “if I became a doctor from UT Southwestern, I would be a very good one and that’s all I wanted to hear,” she recalled.

After receiving her medical degree from UT Southwestern in 1974, Dr. Young pursued a family medicine residency at the Southern Illinois School of Medicine in Carbondale. She completed one year before entering the Air Force.

Clearly, another personal motivation for Dr. Young joining the Air Force was her engagement and eventual marriage to an Air Force member, Herbert Young.

“He was actually the first one who suggested I join the Air Force,” Dr. Young recalls, “because, as he put it, of a great need for good doctors and that I could make a real difference.”

A call to serve

Some of Dr. Young’s earliest interests in joining the military must have been hereditary, as her father served in the Navy during World War II.

“I was born in 1948 and no doubt because of my father’s service, we were raised to have a great respect for the military,” said Dr. Young, whose numerous cousins and uncles served in the armed forces, several prominently during the 1991 Desert Storm campaign. “We were raised to believe it was a highly appropriate thing to do to serve our country.”

She understood that she could join the Air Force while taking her licensing exams to become a fully certified family care doctor. In fact, the Air Force did not require more than one year of residency before Dr. Young could be licensed to become a primary care physician.

In Dr. Young’s primary care clinic at Oklahoma’s Altus Air Force Base, she saw various military members and their families, while often rotating into the emergency room. Dr. Young would soon complete an Aerospace Medicine Primary Program (at Texas’ Brooks Air Force Base), making history as one of the first four women ever to train as a flight surgeon.

Dr. Young quickly learned that flight surgeon is the military term for a primary care provider who is integrated into the Air Force mission – meaning they provide medical care such as physicals, immunizations, and other occupational medical services to the approximately 400 personnel supporting one military aircraft.

She soon integrated with her Air Force unit: “It might be flying with them, as a ‘backseater’ in the cockpit,” she said, “or as a copilot on a helicopter mission, all to observe how positive was morale, and often to make a determination if someone was healthy enough to remain at their job.”

Words caught in her throat as she reflected on the most difficult aspect of her life as a flight surgeon: dealing with crash-caused injuries and occasional pilot deaths.

“Clearly the most serious thing that I had to deal with as a flight surgeon was someone dying in an airplane crash,” said Dr. Young. “You are literally left with picking up the pieces. It is very traumatic because we cannot leave any of those pieces behind.”

Eighteen hours after being notified of her deployment in Desert Storm, Dr. Young was on her way to King Khalid Military City in Saudi Arabia. And during Operation Restore Hope, Dr. Young would command a medical squadron in Egypt and Somalia.

During her 20-year military career, her domestic and foreign deployments have included: Altus Air Force Base and Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma; Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana; deployments in Japan, Iraq, Great Britain, and Korea; Ramstein Air Base in Germany (Desert Storm); and Operation Restore Hope in Egypt and Somalia. During this time, Dr. Young earned the prestigious Rescue Air Crew of the Year in 1991 and 1995.

Old school mates

Murray Gordon, M.D., is a proud member of the UT Southwestern Medical School Class of 1974 and was a classmate of Dr. Young. He met Dr. Young on their first day of classes at UT Southwestern in 1970.

“Gladys always stood out,” said Dr. Gordon. “First off, physically, Gladys was and still is a big woman – taller than me. And then she was quite outspoken. Of course, there weren’t too many women – about eight out of our class of 100 – in medical school back then so clearly among the women in our class, Gladys exuded a presence that was simply different from the other women.”

Dr. Gordon recalled being on several clinical rotations with Dr. Young. Though eventually separated by miles of geographic and career experience, Dr. Gordon and Dr. Young regularly caught up with each other, and exchanged med school memories, during their periodic class reunions.

Dr. Gordon noted how Dr. Young’s military experience made her a better doctor: “I don’t doubt that she was a good fit for the military. Because for as long as I’ve known her, she’s always been very organized and regimented – qualities that totally fit in the military.”

Ultimately, Dr. Gordon has always found Dr. Young to be someone who pushed back on the stereotypic vision of the aspiring female doctor of the early 1970s. Then, Dr. Gordon noted, women were expected to become pediatricians, “not necessarily vascular surgeons.”

“Clearly, Gladys was fighting those stereotypes, which may relate to her outspokenness,” Dr. Gordon said. “Those issues were clearly meaningful to her.”

Big Sky love

When she was not flying around the globe, Dr. Young sought the solace of the bucolic rural landscape and “big skies” of Great Falls, Montana, where she now resides full-time following her 1997 military retirement.

Far from fully retired, Dr. Young still practices family medicine at nearby Logan Health. And when not in a white coat, Dr. Young is an active member of Victory Church Sisters, which actively supports homeless women veterans.

“Montana always had a lifestyle that suited me and my family,” Dr. Young said.

Indeed, after retiring from the military, Dr. Young has hardly been on the sidelines of medicine. Instead, she has been in private family practice, mostly affiliated with Montana’s Billings Clinic-Logan Health, and with the more remote town of Chester, with its 1,000 residents.

In fact, while Dr. Young formally retired from medical practice eight years ago, that lasted all of six months because her former colleagues at Logan Health “were desperate to have me come back to help the only two providers on staff,” said Dr. Young, who was named Medical Director of the Liberty County Nursing Home.

Daniel Davis, M.D., the Logan Health EMS Medical Director, took over from Dr. Young as the Chief Medical Officer for Logan-Chester, located two hours east of Glacier National Park.

Dr. Davis pointed out easy parallels between Dr. Young’s passion for public health and what she imports from her military experience “because it’s all about that need to take an organized, systematic approach to problems such as infectious disease issues,” he said. “She really likes to relate her experience in the military critical care transport, citing her time evacuating patients out of a military theater to more sophisticated hospitals for longer term care and how that prepared her for what we do here.”

And then there is Dr. Young’s distinctive personality – a blend of passion and a fundamental understanding of what a medical institution can do for its patients.

“When it comes to Dr. Young’s personality, I think it must have been, and continues to be, an ideal fit for the military,” Dr. Davis said. “She exudes a strong personality with a lot of confidence and a willingness to take on difficult issues and confront them head on. And when she’s facing something like a recurring COVID-19 outbreak in the nursing home, and the kind of push back that might come from those who don’t like things like mandatory masking, testing, or isolation, she is simply unflinching.”

Another quality that Dr. Davis sees in Dr. Young has more than a tangential connection to her military experience: an undistilled duty to serve others.

“We have a running joke here,” Dr. Davis said, “that the only thing Dr. Young does not do well is retire.”

Dr. Davis particularly admires Dr. Young’s spitfire personality, co-existing with her tender touch when it comes to humane end-of-life and palliative care.

“She clearly feels very strongly about a patient and family-centric approach to death – again perhaps reflecting on her time in the military and just fast-forwarding by 50 years – which can often be lacking in the care for the elderly,” Dr. Davis said.

Veterans Day celebrates a military and medical calling

Dr. Young easily draws tightly entwined connections between her military experience and how it has influenced her medical career.

“I think it’s the team dynamics that I learned from the Air Force,” she said. “I have always been part of a team, working together in-flight medicine and how it taught me how to get a team to work together at the highest level.”

With every year, Veterans Day resonates strongly for Dr. Young.

“It makes me think of all the wonderful people I’ve worked with over the years, in addition to fondly recalling that special environment,” Dr. Young said. “There’s no better people in the world than those I worked with in the Air Force.”

Veterans Day also elicits memories of the mindset she had to develop as an Air Force flight surgeon and how often she was presented with life-and-death challenges. She admitted that those traumatic situations “never posed a problem, because like flyers who fly combat missions, like those who practice combat medicine, we have a personality trait where we can take a tough situation and put it in a box, tie a ribbon around it, and put it on a shelf and not have it affect us right in the moment. My approach at that moment is to do all I can to care for this person. It would be highly counterproductive to think otherwise.”

Dr. Young paused before considering one indelible moment when her emotions did get the better of her: A pilot was trying to land a private plane, after losing an engine, at Altus Air Force Base in Oklahoma. He ended up crashing, caught in the flames of his crumpled aircraft, as he screamed for his life.

“The fire chief had to hold me down as he kept on saying, ‘Gladys, you can’t save them,’” Dr. Young recalled. “He said that all I would do is kill myself by trying to rescue them. But I didn’t care.”

Dr. Young paused that personally traumatic narrative, gathered herself, before continuing: “My life in the military as a flight surgeon was always engaging at every moment. It was always interesting to have the constant opportunity to make a real difference in the world.”